People working in various environments need to collaborate with others with regard to documents and other electronic records. This is easy to do one-on-one in person but hard to do within a document that many people are working on when these people view it asynchronously and are not collocated.
People miss the tangible simplicity of being to be able to point at content and say what they feel about it, thereby starting an informal discussion with others that will ultimately resolve the matter in question. People reviewing a document want to be able to see at a high level what parts of a document are currently being discussed but do not want these comments, markings and annotations to clutter up the document they are trying to review. People reviewing also want to be able to quickly and efficiently assess what is being discussed.
Conventional comment models fail to provide a balanced way for users to easily accomplish the goals above. Conventional comment models are cumbersome, distract the user, and do not invite the user to provide their own feedback.
For example, MICROSOFT WORD attempts to accomplish this task by pulling aside all the comments into the right margin. This model doesn't scale. These comments quickly pile up adding clutter to the document as they push down the full height of the right margin and add a web of lines that attempt to associate the comment with to which it relates. Further, this comment model does not invite a response from their viewer. The comments are poorly organized and appear as a bunch individual statements that cannot be easily understood/read as a chronological discussion. Comments provide poor attribution to who said what when and in response to whom. MICROSOFT WORD relies on its users to circulate comments to others and keep track of the various comments that are on different copies and versions of a document.
BUZZWORD software provides another document collaboration environment. The system does not scale well either, and comments can easily become unpaired from the content they reference which may no longer be visible alongside the comment. This model does not encourage others to respond or handle discussions between multiple users well. Important information is also placed at the footer of the comment which is difficult to reference or skim in documents with many or long comments.